Pattern Release: the Grey Matter Beanie

Hello friends!

I am delighted to share my newest design with you, which is both my most and least favorite design of the year (keep reading to find out why)

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Since 2020, I have participated in the Crochet Cancer Challenge which is hosted each year by my friend Christine at Sweet Potato 3. If you’ve been a reader of my blog posts and emails over the years, you probably know that cancer profoundly touched my life twice by the time I was 30. My mother was diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer when she was 43 and my dad was diagnosed with Glioblastoma (brain cancer) when he was 51. My mom lived with her cancer for just over a decade. My dad lived with his for just under a year.

I was in my early 20s when both of them were diagnosed (okay, technically I was 2 weeks from my 20th birthday when my mom was diagnosed), and regrettably I was much more concerned with my own young adult life than I was with treasuring the time I had left with my parents. It has now been 18 years since my dad passed and almost 12 years since my mom joined him. I made it all the way through my 30s without their wisdom and guidance, and now I am in my 40s, seeing my peers still making memories with their parents. Some of my peers are even becoming grandparents now and their parents are experiencing the joy of being great-grandparents. My parents will forever be in their early 50s, and this lives in the back of my mind as I always wonder if my own life expectancy has around a decade left.

Writing this post every year is hard. I have yet to get through my annual Cancer Challenge post without crying, and this year is no different. Today (October 5) is my dad’s birthday, and as is my annual tradition I am releasing this year’s cancer challenge hat in his honor.

My mom’s favorite color was pink, and she was very vocal in her disappointment that “breast cancer took the pretty color and I got uglyass teal ribbons”. I have managed over the past 5 years to make one teal hat, but she was right- that color is not the best and I have a very hard time getting inspired to work with that color.

Grey goes with everything, and it doesn’t offend my eyes while I am working with it. So while it might feel a bit like I don’t miss my mom because I always make a hat for my dad’s birthday, I have yet to master a design that would not look a bit girly on a man and I know that my mom would have happily worn each of the hats I have designed- especially the ones that are not teal! So really, I honor them both each year with my grey hats. (Come to think of it, I actually haven’t designed a grey hat since 2021. But I already typed this paragraph and so few people actually read my blog posts anyway, so I’ll just leave it as-is)

In a previous year, I shared some fun stories about my dad and his affection for flatulence humor. I don’t recall sharing a fun story about my mom, but I am seriously in need of a happy memory right about now to lighten up the whole “my parents died of cancer and that really sucks” mood I have going on.

My mom did her best to have fun with her baldness. She went through chemotherapy so many times over the decade she lived with cancer that I lost count. And she accumulated a vast collection of wigs, both beautiful and fun. She had one wig that was made to be worn under a hat, so the top part was just bald. She called that one her “bozo” wig, and golly was it funny when she would forget that she was wearing it and take her hat off! Her favorite activity though was just to randomly take her wig completely off in public. She probably traumatized a little girl for life when on an airplane she was wearing a mask (remember, this was almost 20 years before mask-wearing was commonplace). The little girl was seated in front of my parents and kept peeking at my mom between the seats and loudly asking her dad, “whats on that lady’s face?” My mom was feeling rundown and wishing that the father in front of her would tell his kid to sit down and face forward, but after being patient for over an hour and the dad doing nothing, my mom finally opened her eyes super wide and stared the little girl down, then whipped her wig off and lunged toward the child! She immediately sat down in her seat, my mom put her wig back on and sat back in her chair as the little girl could be heard saying, “Daddy! That lady just took her hair off at me!”

Another time, I was in cosmetology school and my mom brought my daughter who was a toddler in for a little haircut. I was showing my daughter around the beauty school when one of my friends ran over to me and said, “that lady over there just took her wig off and set it on the back of the chair!” Knowing it was my mom, I said, “I’m gonna go steal her wig and wear it!” and then dashed across the floor, swiped the wig and flopped it on my head before my mom even noticed. It would have been the perfect execution except for the fact that my daughter went running to hug my mom and my cover was blown.

Bringing up those fun memories really did me a lot of good just now. It is important to keep a sense of humor through struggles- almost as important as it is to praise our Creator in all things- times of joy and times of sorrow. He is the only one who loves us completely and will use every crappy situation to His glory in one way or another. Of all the lessons my parents taught me before they left to be with Jesus, this is the most important one. Know who made you and that He loves you always. I had a dark period of time in my life for about a decade- between the time my daddy died and my husband nearly died. In desperation I began to pray to the God whom I had turned my back on, and I witnessed a miracle as my husband was healed. In nearly an instant, I went from nearly becoming widowed at 32 years old to a super annoying “Bible Beater” who simply can’t resist an opportunity to share the gospel whenever I can. My mom would be so very proud!

Okay, now that I have cried, laughed and Spread the Good News, I suppose it is time to tell you about the actual crochet pattern you came here for. I recently fell in love with the Mainstays Cotton yarn available at Walmart. It is soooo soft, like leaps and bounds softer than those ” __ and cream” cotton yarns you can get, and while the color variety is not expansive (seriously, I have only seen 5 colors so far), the shades are all gorgeous and at under $4 per skein…. I’ve spent at least $100 on just this yarn in the past few months. (Yeah, I love it THAT much!) So far, I have released 2 handbag patterns and today’s hat pattern which used the Mainstays Cotton yarn for my samples. I also have a few more designs on my hook that will be featuring this amazing yarn, so be sure to keep an eye out!

One thing you might not know about me is that I absolutely despise designing hats. I don’t know why exactly- it could just boil down to the fact that I look stupid in every hat that ever adorns my head. Or perhaps it is some lingering mental trauma from my cosmetology school days (Ms. Marcia saying, “Now girls remember… the head is rownd” in her thick Minnesotan accent plays in my brain on repeat more than 20 years later). Whatever it is, hats are absolutely my design nemesis. I frog and redo them over and over until I finally arrive at a design that I don’t love, but I hate less than the last 30 attempts. This year’s hat was no different. I really hoped that with using my newly found favorite yarn, I could manage to get through this one with a bit of ease, but this design took me over 2 months to complete- mainly because I would work 10 stitches at a time and then set the hat aside to work on something I enjoyed more. Because the Cancer Challenge is so dear to my heart, I do commit to designing one hat per year. Sometimes I might make more than one in a year, but this is a rare occurrence because hats just don’t spark joy for me.

So… I think that pretty much sums up how this is both my most and least favorite design of the year- it causes me allllllll of the emotions plus the whole 5 stages of grief every year. But I think in all, this is a healthy thing for me to do!

You can get a copy of the Grey Matter Beanie pattern below:

During the month of October 2024, you can get a copy of the pattern for FREE when you pledge to donate at least one hat made from the pattern to a cancer patient. You can give it as a gift to a patient you personally know, or you can donate it to your local cancer treatment center. I know for a fact that the chemo patients all love and appreciate these handmade gifts!

Visit the 2024 Crochet Cancer Challenge blog post for the discount code, and be sure to visit the post each day in October- there are a total of 27 brand new hat designs being featured this month, and each design comes with a story of why this challenge is important to the designer.

Want some more hat patterns? Use the code CCC24 to save 75% on all of my previous Cancer Challenge patterns! (This code is valid through the end of October 2024)

Be sure also to subscribe to the Straight Awesome Newsletter to be among the first to know of special events and free and discounted patterns- plus get some exclusive discounts and freebies along the way!

I have 2 more new patterns coming later this month, so stay tuned!

Until next time,

Happy Hooking!

~Malena